how to keep lights ON on the Delorean diamond select?

[agliarept]

I saw this mod on an ebay post, someone modded there 1:15 Delorean to have it's lights on although with no sound. Has anyone done this or know how? I'd like to have that option even tho it would kill the battery.

whats the best way to tackle this?

 

[agliarept]

Bump for the morning folks. any thoughts?

 

[ob1al]

I don't know the electronics on this particular model, do the lights only come on briefly when you press a button or something?

I'm assuming it's lit with LED's - if so, you could connect the LED wiring straight to the power source (the battery or if you prefer adapt it to run from a wall socket) to have them glowing all the time.

 

[Wes R]

The lights flicker in time with the sound effects. If you could wire a switch to somehow bypass the audio and flickering set up you could have multiple options but i don't know the wiring.

 

[agliarept]

yea the lights come on for a brief moment in play and demo mode. it would be ideal to somehow rig it to be plugged into the wall outlet and on the whole time. I want to try my hand at taking it apart this weekend maybe to figure it out. im no expert in wiring tho :-(

 

[ob1al]

If you take it apart and post some pics it would be easier to advise you. I'm no expert, but it sounds like it should be a fairly simple job. If you are putting it on a display base you could hide the power lead under the car, out the back of the base and into the wall. You'd have to be careful though, you don't want to blow the LED's. Does the unit run on a 9v battery? If so, you can buy a 9v power source to rig the wiring too.

 

[agliarept]

Here are some pics of the main board where all the lights connect to. what do you guys think?

 

[familyman]

I would be very interested in seeing if this can be figured out.

 

[modeljag]

You need to connect all the positive and negative wires for the LEDs together respectively and hook them up to a DC power source (batteries, wall wart, etc.) at around the same voltage that is driving them now.

They will need resistors though, and it will be easier for you to wire in some through-hole style resistors than trying to incorporate the tiny SMD resistors on the control board though. I can't tell you exactly what resistors are needed though without a close inspection of the board or playing with the LEDs themselves, maybe someone else can help out there.

 

[autoprops713]

I looked this up and it says that it takes 3 AAA batteries...correct? If that's the case I'm assuming you will blow the LEDs if you hook them up directly to the power supply. The sound board probably needs that extra voltage but not the LEDs.

Odds are that the LEDs would be fine at 3V so if you can remove one of the batteries (go to 2 instead of 3) and then hard wire them to the lighting...it should be ok. Of course you would need to keep the switch in there somewhere.

 

[ob1al]

You could try 1000k resistors for the LED's. I've hooked up tons of LED's to a 9v wall power supply using 1000k resistors and never noticed a loss of illumination or had any overheating problems. Not very scientific but it works for me.